FeedCity

TikTok threatening to shut down completely on Sunday — which is more than is required by the law — is such a transparent attempt to influence the supreme court and others. Good riddance. It’s not great if everyone just joins Reels, but we need a shake-up.

If you only build a new skyscraper every year or so, downtown Austin doesn’t seem like it’s changing much. Looking at the skyline, it’s familiar — hey there’s the capitol, and the Frost tower, and… — but when I think about the full scope of changes over decades, it’s almost unrecognizable.

History is going to view Joe Biden very favorably. He accomplished a lot that we’re only just starting to see results from. Competent management of the pandemic and a peace deal for Gaza are bookends. Thanks Joe. 🇺🇸

Looking for a headshot-style photo, it’s surprisingly hard to find something good in my photo library that doesn’t have other people in the photo. Maybe I need to take more selfies.

Was SwiftUI a mistake? Steve Troughton-Smith writes on Mastodon:

Boy do I wish Apple had built a real Apple-quality next-gen UIKit/AppKit-like first-party cross-[Apple]-platform UI framework instead of SwiftUI. The closest thing Apple makes is still Catalyst, but they completely squandered their opportunity to make something better than what came before. Going all-in on SwiftUI is the kind of mistake that will hurt for decades to come

This is a frequent topic on Core Intuition. For the Mac, there are pros and cons for choosing AppKit, Catalyst, or SwiftUI. It shouldn’t be that way.

Micro.blog’s tweets import sometimes struggles, and it needed a few kicks before we finally got Romit Mehta’s tweet archive of over 140k tweets imported. But it works! The cool thing about the architecture is that after import it makes everything available on a separate blog and via an API.

Good article by Jason Snell at Macworld about how Apple’s previous playback is in conflict with recent products like the Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence. Also this bit about how Apple’s culture is still in the 1990s despite their massive success:

Today’s Apple is a titan, but it still behaves like it’s a put-upon underdog in danger of being taken advantage of by the cold, cruel world.

I’m sure I’ve blogged the same thing. I still think we hit peak Apple about a year ago.

ChatGPT scheduled tasks are interesting. I’ve tried a few things — sending me a news summary or programming tip at a certain time — and it works as advertised. Not sure I have a good use case right now, so for fun I’m having it send me a haiku.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bug related to == vs. === in JavaScript. Half the time we’re comparing strings anyway and it just doesn’t matter, so why ugly up your code with an extra =? Also while I’m being controversial, real tabs are great. 🤪

Sara Dietschy’s latest video about AI voice and video clones is really good. Both the technical side and also finding the right balance: using AI sparingly where it fits, recognizing that most content should be created the old-fashioned way. People want to feel a connection with a real human.

Revisiting my tweet import code (see this post) to see what can be optimized. I really hope Twitter / X doesn’t change their export file format anytime soon. May not be worth updating my code again for major changes.

I plan to ignore Trump for most of the next few years, and I’m not even ready to read the special counsel report yet. But John Gruber’s post rings true to me. We needed a trial to educate voters, to cut through the disinformation. It was a major failure that they didn’t happen. 🇺🇸

Dave Winer in a longer post collecting thoughts on Matt Mullenweg and other things:

I don’t like that people have called him things like the Mad King. People used to say stuff like that about me. It’s a substitute for trying to understand where someone is coming from.

I’ve adopted the “mad king” phrasing in recent posts about Matt and about Automattic. I just find it amusing, a way to poke fun at the whole drama. I don’t actually think he’s crazy.

Starting up a new TestFlight beta for Micro.blog for iOS. This release will include support for photo collections. You can tap a photo to add it to a collection, or create a new collection in the app.

Do I brag too much or not enough? It occurred to me that Micro.blog might be on the only platform of its kind that has built-in support for exporting content in several different file formats. And multiple APIs to get your data out? JSON, XML-RPC, Micropub. Our commitment to portability is absolute.

From an article at NPR about what might happen to TikTok when the law goes into effect:

It’s also possible that users will be able to access the app but it may be buggy, operate slowly or crash often, the TikTok official said.

Buggy and crash? I guess it’s possible that if some backend services were shut down it could cause problems for the app. Sounds more like made up nonsense, though, as TikTok scrambles to figure out what to do because they only had literal years notice this might happen.

Free Our Feeds looks like a sincere effort but it’s a little vague. $30 million is a lot of money to raise via donations. I’d love to see this team communicate in more detail what they want to do.

Funny how “billionaire” is now effectively a synonym for “anyone rich”. It’s almost a cheat — like a shortcut to describe venture capital or any profit. Won’t anyone think of the poor millionaires who are unfairly grouped together with the super-rich? 🤪

With the increase in scrutiny around how Matt Mullenweg manages the WordPress project, some people have asked whether it’s a risk to invest in .blog, which is owned by Automattic, and in fact whether Micro.blog is online only at the whims of the mad king. I’m not worried. It...

Good morning, IndieWeb! We’ve got a meetup this Wednesday in Austin, at Radio Coffee & Beer. You can RSVP here or just show up. ☕️🍺

As more people follow Bluesky users in Micro.blog, there are more posts that are flowing into our platform, so you’ll start to see the occasional Bluesky post in Discover too. Discover can evolve to be a snapshot of interesting microblogs anywhere, Mastodon too, even if it’s mostly Micro.blog users.

Thanks David Pierce for including my home screen in the latest Installer at The Verge! I mention some of the apps on my home screen and why they’re there. Lots of great CES coverage at The Verge this last week too.

I’m a frequent critic of modern Apple but I’m happy to point out when they stand up for values that have nothing to do with money. As Meta and Amazon are disbanding their DEI efforts, Apple is pushing back. The term DEI is tainted now, unfortunately. Scrap the acronym. Keep working toward the goal.

I’m interested in the IndieWeb, books, and thinking about curation, so of course I love this post from Ben Werdmuller:

The indieweb should feel like the Norrington Room: an expansive world of different voices, opinions, modes of expression, and art that you can explore, peruse, or have curated for you. It’s not about any particular goal aside from the goal of being enriched by people sharing their lived experiences, creativity, and expertise. It’s a journey of discovery, conversation, and community, not a journey of extraction.

Hope to visit Blackwell’s one day too.

Palmetto State Park. San Marcos River, trail, and old CCC building.

There are a bunch of interesting new smart glasses at CES — see this post by Victoria Song at The Verge — but I’m still looking for something simpler. Looks like normal glasses, can take photos, no screen, optionally you can talk to it, not made by Meta.

Ouch. Pretty good game until everything unraveled on the 1 yard line. Great season overall for UT though. 🏈

On Core Int 624 we talk all about Micro.one! Daniel checks it out live on the show for the first time and has feedback about the sign up process and business.

The popular Mastodon server Hachyderm.io has defederated with Threads. They have a long post with their reasoning: Threads’ recent changes in their moderation policies, both what they’ve put in and what they’ve taken out (read the diff), puts their moderation practices in d...

Catching up on the Bluesky world, I missed this note in Last Week in Bluesky about trending topics:

The technological underpinning of how Trending Topics work on Bluesky is noteworthy: every trending topic is a custom feed. Every time a new topic is trending, a new custom feed gets created, giving the team better control over the topic. It also allows for new possibilities that have not yet been explored, such as archiving and documenting feeds after the trend is over, or other options that have not yet been explored.

I like it. Technical choices affect what’s possible with moderation.